The astronaut sham

The so-called "Mercury 13," (or should it be 25?), a combination academic and media fraud, gets a going over by veteran space writer James Oberg. His piece is poorly edited, but the details are all there (just repeated now and then). How the University of Wisconsin lent credence to spurious claims of women denied astronaut status at the beginning of the space race. In fact, Oberg shows, they weren’t the test pilots President Eisenhower had stipulated, and so they could not be chosen.